Kids of Appetite

  “Shit,” spits Mendes.

  I stare at the file where Mendes stuck Dad’s Terminal Note, suddenly wishing I hadn’t given it to her.

  “At the very least,” says Ron, “we’ll talk to her when she checks in tonight.”

  Mendes nods. “Keep trying. Ask around the neighborhood, coworkers, etcetera.”

  Detective Ronald nods but lingers.

  “Something else I can help you with?” asks Mendes.

  “Can I speak with you in the hallway, please?”

  Mendes stands, disappears through the door—taking her file with her—and for the first time in a while, I’m alone.

  I unzip a side pocket of my bag, pull out my prized possession: a photograph of Mad. The photo has many qualities, but the thing I like most is that there are no distractions, no annoyances, no obstructions between my eyes and Mad. I don’t have to pretend to look at anything or anyone else, because there is nothing and no one else to look at.

  It is just Mad. Sitting on a street curb somewhere.

  “What do you have there?”

  Mendes studies me from the doorway. “Nothing,” I say, stowing away the photo. “Can I have Dad’s note back, please?”

  She crosses the room in a few quick strides, places her file on the table, and sits. “Of course you can. Just as soon as I make a few copies.”

  “What if I don’t want you to make copies?”

  “And here I thought you wanted to cooperate.”

  . . .

  . . .

  I pull out my handkerchief and dab my leaky mug. “What time is it?”

  Mendes sighs, looks at her watch. “Five forty. Listen, Vic. You don’t know where your mom is, do you?”

  I shake my head, fold the light blue cloth, and finish the fold in a tight square.

  Mendes watches with vague curiosity. “Because we can’t seem to contact her. Not that we haven’t been in contact with her. Every night for the last four nights she checks in by phone. Always just after midnight. Do you know why she does that?”

  I don’t answer.

  “She’s worried sick,” says Mendes. “And judging by the hour of her calls, my guess is she’s not sleeping.”

  “Look, what do you want from me? I don’t know where she is.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Okay.” Mendes sips her coffee. “It’s just I’ve heard a lot of frustration from you today—about losing your dad, feeling like you might be losing your mom, too. I know things have been difficult recently, but I think you should know how much your mom cares about you, how worried she’s been. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Quiet observers tend to be loud thinkers.

  And this particular thought is shot through a bullhorn into the unsuspecting ether: If Mom is so worried, why are Detective Ronald’s calls going to voice mail in the first place?

  (FIVE days ago)

  VIC

  Elton John’s “Rocket Man” spun in the background.

  Coco sat directly across the coffee table, cards spread out in a fan in front of her face, eyes leering over the top. Her feet dangled a couple of inches off the ground, legs swinging in time with the song.

  “Got any aces?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  I drew a new card.

  Last night, after Mad left, sleep had been slippery. I kept my earbuds in for a while, tried to let the soaring sopranos do their work. But it was no use. At some point, Baz came in smelling of stale popcorn. If he noticed Mad’s empty bedding, he didn’t say anything. And just when I wondered if I would ever find sleep, it found me. When I woke up this morning, Coco was at the table, shuffling a deck of cards.

  Baz had left early for a breakfast date with Rachel, which, according to Coco, was most likely a breakup breakfast. “He prefers dumping his girlfriends in the morning,” she said, shuffling cards by haphazardly spreading them out all across the table. “Baz says it’s impossible to yell over pancakes, says it’s scientifically proven. I told him I wasn’t so sure about his science, but if he wanted to bring me some pancakes with extra maple syrup, I could get on board with whatever.”

  Baz had left a note with instructions to meet at Foodville at noon to discuss the third place on Dad’s list. When I asked Coco where Nzuzi was, or if she knew where Mad had gone last night, she dealt the cards, said I’d have to earn my answers.

  Three games of Go Fish later . . .

  “Twos haff you kot to give me?” asked Coco.

  “What?”

  “Twos. Haff you kot twos?”

  “Why are you talking like that?”

  Her legs stopped swinging. “Talking like what?”

  . . .

  “I don’t have any twos,” I said.

  She drew a card from the pile, inserted it into her fan, and went back to staring at me. I was no stranger to the courage of little kids, or to their lack of inner monologue. They usually said out loud what most adults only thought, which part of me admired. The other part of me dreaded going out in public, knowing at least one kid would most likely act on that courage.

  . . .

  Coco stared at me over her cards. And even though there could be no doubt she was stuffed full of little kid courage, she had yet to ask about my face.

  “Got any sevens?” I asked.

  “Ko fishing.”

  “Okay, what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With the accent.”

  Coco set her cards on the table, stood, and grabbed a jar of peanut butter off the Shelf of Improbable Things. “I’ve been working on accents. This one is my Norm.”

  “From Babushka’s?”

  “Yes.”

  . . .

  “Okay,” I said. “Why?”

  She dug her little fingers into the jar, scooped a healthy portion into her mouth. “What’s that old saying about something being a riddle wrapped in a mystery or something?”

  In my Land of Nothingness, I saw Frank the Boyfriend’s book left open on the living room couch like he owned the place. He had several Churchill biographies, most of which had abandoned bookmarks somewhere in the first third. Frank liked chipping away at things even if they never quite tumbled.

  “Winston Churchill was talking about Russia’s role in World War Two.”

  “Russian!” said Coco. “See? Just like Norm.”

  . . .

  “Churchill said Russia was ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’”

  Coco smacked her lips, her mouth full of peanut butter. “You’re kind of a nerd, huh?”

  I am an Aspiring Car Rental Entrepreneur.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, putting the jar away. “I’m the riddle wrapped in the mystery inside the whatchamacallit.”

  Considering the fact that I was currently playing Go Fish with an eleven-year-old in a greenhouse while waiting for our friend to finish his breakfast breakup over pancakes so we could discuss the third of five prearranged locations at which my deceased father wished his ashes to be scattered, I thought maybe we were all riddles wrapped in mysteries inside whatchamacallits.

  Coco sat back down and, within minutes, completed her third annihilating victory over me.

  “I’m never going to beat you, you know?”

  She smiled, dealt a fourth round. “I know.”

  “So how about you tell me where Mad went?”

  She fanned out her cards again, and even though I never had a sister, this entire interaction was beginning to feel the way I imagined having a sister might be. Slightly annoying behavior combined with slightly hilarious antics.

  “Listen, Spoils. I’m from Queens.”

  “So you’ve mentioned.”

  “People in Queens don’t bullshit each other, okay?”
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  “Okay.”

  “So here’s the truth. I have no idea where Mad went. But she’ll be back. She always comes back.”

  “You mean she’s done this before?”

  Vinyl Elton came to an end. Coco hopped down from her chair, stood on the couch. She took Elton John off the spindle, replaced it with an old copy of the Sugarhill Gang. “Vic, you need to chill. We all have things, you know? Mad reads The Outsiders and tells kick-A stories, and sometimes she leaves. It’s one of her things. But she always comes back.”

  Coco reclaimed her spot at the table, fanned out her cards, and resumed staring. “Got any tens? Tell the truth.”

  * * *

  Bury me in the smoking bricks of our first kiss.

  We stood in the eleventh aisle of Foodville for a solid hour, dissecting the third clue. Baz came straight here from his breakfast date, his face stoic, steadfast, covered in emotional camouflage. There was no way to tell how the breakup had gone, or if Coco’s assessment as to the calming power of pancakes was remotely accurate. I hadn’t participated in many breakups, seeing as how a breakup necessitated an initial get-together.

  I had not had much luck at initial get-togethers.

  But hey.

  I had some kick-ass Metpants and a cool-but-not-in-the-traditional-sense haircut once worn by dreamy young Rob Lowe, so I wasn’t sweating it.

  Nzuzi showed up too, and neither Coco nor Baz acted like his brief absence this morning was any big deal, but I couldn’t help wonder at the timing of his departure, close as it was to Mad’s own.

  After drawing a complete blank on clue number three, Baz suggested we move on to the fourth one: drown me in our wishing well.

  “What about the mall?” said Coco.

  Nzuzi snapped once.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “It has a wishing well, right? In the food court?”

  I had no memory of a well in the mall food court, and no earthly idea what significance such a place might have had in my parents’ lives. In the end, I had no better alternative than to convince myself that perhaps Mom and Dad had had some special bonding moment (at the freaking mall) of which I was completely unaware. Baffled, I agreed that, yes, I supposed the mall could have been a possibility.

  And off we went.

  We took a quick detour by White Manna. Since Coco had an indefinite ban, I waited outside with her while Baz and Nzuzi went in to order. They returned a few minutes later with a bag of world-class sliders, which we shared as we began the mile-and-a-half walk to the mall. (Baz removed the buns from his sliders, in keeping with his anti-bread philosophy.)

  Before, I’d admired the kids much the way I admired Matisse’s The Dance: they were fantastical, otherworldly, and even though they were real, it wasn’t like I could just jump into their painting. I could stare at them, wonder about them, imagine what they were like. But I could never experience them. And now here I was, experiencing the Dance from inside the circle—in their painting. But it wasn’t complete. Without Mad, it felt like I’d simply taken her spot in the Dance. Which was a real problem for me, considering how badly I wanted to dance with her.

  The walk was pretty brutal: even under the blue knit cap, my Cinematic Sodapop had yet to acclimate itself to such temperatures.

  Also, I almost got run over by a very large produce truck.

  Here’s what happened: I saw Roland (the bully with the mismatched shoes) and his little gang across the street. Before they saw us, I suggested we take a slight detour through a connecting alley. Baz agreed, and just as I started to cross into the alley, he grabbed my backpack and pulled me out of the way of a produce truck lumbering by.

  “No worries,” said Baz after I thanked him. “Dr. James L. Conroy says one of the most important things in writing a book is raising the stakes.”

  “This is the guy who wrote a book on how to write a book, yeah?”

  “One and the same,” said Baz. “And your almost getting squished by a produce truck certainly raises the stakes.”

  He chuckled about this all the way down the alley. I followed behind, wiped my leaky mug, and wondered if it was possible to feel entirely comfortable around someone who was always looking for the literary angles.

  By the time we arrived at the mall, we were all pretty much frozen to the bone. Without removing our coats, we made straight for the center of the food court. One little kid pointed right at me, asked his mom what was wrong with my face. There it was. The little kid courage. My eyes immediately darted to my boots. There were always things I wanted to say, comforts Dad offered after remarks like this, about value not being contingent on sameness, comparisons to Matisse, beauty in asymmetry, and all the rest. I wanted to tell this kid a lot of things.

  But I didn’t.

  And then—something miraculous—the arms of the Dance made themselves known.

  Baz put an arm around my shoulder.

  Coco put an arm around my waist.

  Nzuzi glared at the kid and his mother.

  “People are dickwads,” Coco whispered in my ear. “And I’m from Queens.”

  Tears threatened, but the good kind. We walked like that, arm in arm, passing no fewer than four vendors offering free samples of curious-smelling meat on a toothpick. No one, not even Coco, accepted.

  * * *

  Much like the Parlour and the Palisades, a thick anticipation hung in the air. Unlike those places, however, the anticipation felt manufactured. For starters, the wishing well was a momentous eyesore. Parked right in the middle of the food court, it was a measly construction of turquoise tile and rough white grout. The reservoir itself was about ten feet in diameter, and in the middle, a faucet dripped foggy water through the mouth and ears and nostrils and backside of—the heart-thinker in me could scarcely believe mine eyes—a unicorn.

  “What the motherfrakking frak . . . ?” said Coco.

  “Coco—”

  “Baz, seriously though. Come on. I mean it looks like this thing is having, like, universal, like, superhuman diarrhea. Hey, whoa, also—can you believe people throw real money in there?”

  Nzuzi snapped twice.

  The speed with which Coco could change subjects made my head spin. Nzuzi was the only one who seemed able to keep up with her.

  “People,” whispered Coco, shaking her head. “What a bunch of dickwads.”

  Nzuzi snapped once.

  Baz nodded toward my backpack, and even though it all felt wrong, it was now or never. I removed the urn, opened it, and pulled out a pinch of Dad. Rationally, I understood that even if this wasn’t the right place, even if we later discovered that Dad had actually meant a different wishing well, I could always scatter him there, too. It wasn’t like I was running out of ashes. There was, literally, plenty of Dad to go around. But the finality of putting him in the wrong place forever—specifically this wrong place—made me sick to my stomach.

  Because Dad would not rest in peace.

  He would rest in pieces.

  The horn of the unicorn pointed directly at my chest. I tried to imagine my young parents being happy here, laughing at this stupid unicorn. I tried to let the image take root in my soul, a necessity should I ever be able to cross this place off Dad’s list, and do so with a guilt-free conscience.

  “Drown me in our wishing well,” I said.

  “Drown me in our wishing well,” repeated Coco.

  “Drown me in our wishing well,” said Baz.

  And just as I was about to toss Dad’s ashes around the hooves of the unicorn, Nzuzi snapped twice. He stood off to the side of the turquoise monstrosity, pointing at something.

  Coco walked over to see what it was. “Uh, Spoils? When did your old man die?”

  “December second, 2013. Why?”

  “‘Welcome to the Barbara Tetterton Memorial Well, erected May 2014.’?
??

  . . .

  . . .

  Coco cleared her throat, patted Nzuzi on the back. “Well, that was a close frakking call. Good catch, Zuz.”

  I felt Dad in my hand, thinking how close I’d been to tossing him in this kitschy nightmare of a well forever and ever. We stood silently for a moment, staring at the lavish, phallic unicorn, water flowing from its every orifice, appropriately, the heart of the food court, pumping snacks and bourbon chicken and stale subs through its veins.

  This mall was one hell of a sideways hug.

  Coco said, “I wonder what a person has to do while they’re alive to get the local mall to build them an exploding unicorn statue when they die. Barbara Tetterton, the world’s biggest riddle wrapped in the mystery of a whatchamacallit.”

  Nzuzi snapped once.

  And quite suddenly I was exhausted. More than a lack of sleep, the notion of an entire day wasted, with a forecast of nothing but wasted days ahead, ached my bones, my heart, my brain. I dropped Dad back in the urn, placed the urn in my bag, and we all turned to leave. On the way out, Coco accepted no fewer than four free samples of curious-smelling meat on a toothpick.

  MAD

  Baz slept heavily, steadily, his chest rising and falling in peaceful rhythm. In his arms he cradled a baseball bat like it was an infant. Zuz snored too, though his sounded more like radio static. Coco lay in her signature sleeping position: facedown in the sleeping bag, butt in the air, legs tucked up under her chest.

  I crept up to the couch and peered down at Vic. He had his earbuds in, and even though he was clearly asleep, his eyelids were half open like a stalled garage door. The bottoms of his irises were completely visible, which tempted me to sit here and wait for him to go into REM just to see what that would look like.

  But this couldn’t wait.

  I pulled out one of his earbuds and watched his pupils dilate as the garage doors finished their ascent. “How do you do that?” I whispered.

  “Do what?”

  Baz’s snoring stopped abruptly.

  I put a finger over my mouth and froze. Baz turned on his side, pulling the baseball bat with him. He took in a breath, held it for a second, and just when I thought we were in the clear, he started with the mumbling. It was not uncommon, Baz talking in his sleep, and even though it was never in English, I didn’t need to understand the words to hear the fear in his voice.